This week saw the peaceful transition of power to the 46th president of the United States 🇺🇸. While everyone is probably aware of what happened, the great thing about writing it down is that in a few years, it is easy to find what we were up to during that week!
This week saw us jumping between several projects. Finishing-up the Australian plumber time tracking project. We’ve worked out all the bugs, but are now iterating to make it a bit easier. For instance, a few people say they sent in time that was not recorded. To mitigate this, we added an email receipt when they submit time to make it very clear what was saved.
An old survey project appeared on the radar last Friday. We spent some time this week updating questions in the survey. The hang-up for launching is connecting it with the Icelandic SSO. We submitted the call-back URLs, but have not yet been approved. Until then, we can’t quite finish the full workflow.
Also, late last week, we got pulled back into a UI/UX data design project. This week, we made a few mock-ups with a few ideas and got some feedback. This is another project under NDA that hopefully we can talk about once it launches. The rough white-board sketches to the final product is always an interesting journey were you have to leave your ego behind.
We also spent some time onsite with a client working on cohort retention charts. Generating a stacked area chart for each daily cohort and their retention over time. It doesn’t sound too hard, but there are about four intermediate database tables to keep all the tallies calculated and grouped correctly.
There were a few meetings on our Top Secret project. We’ve gotten some feedback from a few other people and it is really looking good. There is one really big other project that needs to clear-out, then the pendulum of focus swings back onto the top secret project and we can finally soft launch it.
With the WhatsApp exodus, several contacts we haven’t spoken with produced a sign-up notification on Signal. It was great to reconnect with some folks, learn what they are up to and how we keep the conversations from growing too stale.
Finally, this week, the carpenters managed to have some free time to come back and work on the office. When the weather is good, they work outside, when the weather is bad, they move indoors. We were a low-priority, but the list has caught-up to us. After a few disastrous fires around town over the last few years, we realised it was time to upgrade a few doors to proper fire protection doors around the office. So Thursday was a lot of concrete drilling to firmly anchor the door frames to the walls to hold the heavy doors.
Friday is the start of the old Icelandic month of Þorri. It is the 4th month of winter, marking the half-way point. The first day of Þorri is also a celebration to men, whereas the first day of Góa celebrates women.
This month we’ll see a lot of Þorrablót celebrations. People eat “traditional” putrified and pickled food like hrútspungur, hákall, svíð and more.